Prospects on Tax Reform

Can History Repeat Itself? It has been 25 years since the last major overhaul of the nation’s income tax laws under the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (“TRA-86”). The world has changed dramatically since that time and the nation’s economy has been replaced by a global economy. The tax laws have become outmoded and no longer work efficiently, and Congress has added to the problem by constantly attempting to use the Code as an instrument of social, economic and political change. There have been literally thousands of changes to the Code since TRA- 86 resulting in inscrutable complexity that threatens to remove the “self” from our once efficient self-assessment system of taxation.